Are women lawyers more ethical than their male counterparts?

A study analysing cases before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) over two decades, has explored whether women make more ethical lawyers than their male counterparts.

In 1996 no women appeared before the tribunal, Andy Boon of City Law School and Avis Whyte of Westminster University found. While this may be because there were so few women solicitors at the time, by 2015, when women accounted for half of all practising solicitors, they still acted as respondents in fewer than a fifth of cases.

According to Boon, the pair delved into this study because they wanted to understand more about the “workings of the disciplinary system, from investigation to disposal, by looking at disciplinary records.”

The researchers also suggested that: “As diversity initiatives begin to have an impact in law firms, a rising number of female partners could afford women lawyers greater opportunities to engage in misconduct.” They also entertained the possibility that “women lawyers do in fact engage in misconduct but do so in a way which is less detectable.”

On the question of what the main difference between the two genders morality is, the research suggests that when female lawyers transgressed, it was to “deliver something they believed to be in the best interests of their client or firm, rather than for a purely selfish motive.” Despite this hypothesis, the number of instances in the data was “insufficient to indicate a clear pattern.”

Boon said: “I don’t think there is any difference between male and female morality at least when it comes to professional responsibility.” He instead advises others to “rule out other explanations of the SDT data before entertaining such a conclusion.”